John Lennon in “All You Need is Love”

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy

I just found this cartoon illustrating the Bill Hick’s routine he closed all of his last shows with and I recently found that cartoons work better than my best condensed well thought out words do. I got it from here.

Zen Pencils

When it comes to my website and what I write here the first rule of “Fight Club” is basically that everything is essentially written about me.

I try to make points based on my immense knowledge of history, especially the history of the art I love, which is pop art.

Almost everything I write is about the choice between love and hate.

Almost everything I write is about the choice between art and commerce.

Almost everything I write is about the choice between greed and sharing.

Those all sound like really easy choices, but they are not because it usually takes just a few people who consciously make the wrong choice to fuck it all up for everyone who does make the right choice, and often those who decide to be pure evil win because they have no moral compass to ruminate over.

At the end of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” choices have to be made to recover the Holy Grail.

Grail Knight: But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.

Godwin’s Law says that 99% of internet discussions devolve until someone mentions Nazis or Hitler and then the entire conversation becomes useless.

When he came up with it, it was very clever, but he perhaps did not consider that just like with witch hunts, sometimes there are actual Nazis.

Then he reconsidered.

The last time I got mad at a friend and I pledge it will be the last time (mostly because I’ve been doing more work picking and choosing my friends). I said to him, “This is not a game!”  He responded “It is a game and I am winning.”

So I realized that hitting Godwin’s Law as quickly as possible was actually a good thing once the other person admits that purpose of the world is winning  a game. So I quoted him Kurt Vonnegut’s most famous and simple Nazi quote and moved on hoping he would think it over. He probably didn’t. Maybe some day before it is too late he will.

If you want things concise and funny always go Vonnegut. This is one of his last essays from 2004.

Cold Turkey

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”

That was 100% true this was just really funny, but thank God that he did die then and was not living today.

““Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me.But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

That also goes for his on stage counterpart who always talked about language and also was almost always right, George Carlin.

The two most famous people who espoused “Winning!” First Charlie Sheen and we know how that turned out. Then Donald Trump, and we know essentially how that will turn out. That will be the first and last time the current “president’s” name will be mentioned.

Instead remember how the super intelligent learning computer in “War Games” finally learned before accidentally blowing up the world playing a nice game of ” Global Thermonuclear War.”

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.

Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.

Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Like a ton of Steven Speilberg’s movies there are Nazis in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Sometimes he makes movies with Nazis because it is easy and so infinitely pleasurable to watch their faces melt off just like they did in the first Indiana Jones movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Sometimes he makes movies with Nazis to record and highlight historical heroism like he did with “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.”

Back to Last Crusade:

Walter Donovan: You could go down in history.

Indiana Jones: As what? A Nazi stooge like you?

Walter Donovan: The Nazis? Is that the limit of your vision? The Nazis want to write themselves into the Grail legend, take on the world. Well, they’re welcome to it. But I want the Grail itself, the cup that gives everlasting life. Hitler can have the world, but he can’t take it with him. I’m going to be drinking my own health after he’s gone the way of the dodo.

Walter Donovan the greediest most selfish man in the history of film.

In the end it is Jones, who chooses “wisely,” but he has to deal with the fact that he can’t keep the Holy Grail once he’s earned it. Really, Indiana Jones was the worst archeologist in the history of the world. Everything he sought came for nothing, but destruction of tons of people and things in his search to put things in museums.

 

Bob Dylan: It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

That movie came out in 1989 and you will see that 1989 was a big year for films.

As the millennium broke in 2000 (or was it 2001? I remember people arguing about it), Sean Connery actually made a better film with a better answer.

Quentin Tarantino’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, “Inglourious Basterds” joyfully builds up as much tension as humanly possible and then ends with the most cinematically explosive, incredibly violent and satisfying orgasm of killing all the “best” Nazis at the same time ever put on film.

And then he bows triumphantly.

Lt. Aldo Raine: You know somethin’, Utivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece!

The one sure thing in my life is that even if I come up with something first, Quentin Tarantino will write it better than me, but I’m aiming for my masterpiece that sums up everything.

* * *
The closest thing I’ve ever seen to a perfectly constructed and realized movie is Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”.

It too came out in 1989. In fact, the first words of the song’s theme “Fight the Power” were indeed “1989!”

I agree with everything in that song except what he said about Elvis, which given the name of my site is an obvious position, but I explain it quickly here:

Elvis and Jackie Wilson True Soul Brothers

My intense breakdown of “Do the Right Thing” linked above, ignoring grammar errors or similar personal imperfections, is still the best thing I have ever written. I saw Spike Lee talk in Berkley right before “Malcolm X” was finished and he got angry and issued a challenge. He basically challenged anyone white to understand the real message of “Do the Right Thing.” I had already seen it a ton of times, and I decided to take that challenge by watching it many, many more times and I think I got it as close to perfectly as was humanly possible.

A few years ago I tweeted it to Spike Lee, but I’m sure he did not read it. Artists get mad when you want them to see how clever you are by analyzing their work, which is exactly why Joan Baez got so mad that Bob Dylan decided to be an artist instead of an activist. Dylan just wrote everything he had to say about politics and then pretty much completely stopped, moved on, and did his best to be as inscrutable as possible for as long as he could. This left a huge industry for a ton of people to try to outwit each other analyzing his songs. Explaining them quickly, might have been easier, but it was a great boon to people like me who want to earn a living by assessing and interpreting the art that they love.

The problem in getting its obvious message was that even though Spike crafted his film and its message as perfectly as possible, Spike Lee is an artist who like many artists gets mad and refuses to explain what the literal meaning of every small piece of his movies are about. It’s understandable, but not very strategic long term. It was exactly this that nearly ruined William Forrester’s life in “Finding Forrester.”

When asked what “Do the Right Thing” meant, given its dueling Martin Luther King/Malcolm X ending quotes that flashed by after the whole world essentially went up in flames, he got mad and essentially said something close to this, “White people ask me all the time why Mookie yelled hate and threw the garbage can through Sal’s Window, but they never want to talk about the fact that Radio Raheem was dead!”

Radio Raheem died because he lived by the credo choose whether you love me or hate me right now!

The last words of Lee’s previous film “School Daze” were “Wake up!” The first words of “Do the Right Thing” were “Wake up!” It was so easy to see in every second of the film no wonder he got so angry.

Mookie, although played by Lee, does not “do the right thing.”

“Do the Right Thing” is a very funny movie that ends tragically, because everyone is pushing Mookie to pick sides.

The character, who best exemplifies doing “the right thing” is actually played by Samuel L. Jackson’s perpetually hard working DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy.

He built his own business.

He worked harder than anyone.

He made his own shrine to put his own heroes up on his own wall to solve the sad fact that as Chuck D wrote in the film’s opening theme, “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps!”

When everyone went on a crazy tirade of racial invectives against everyone else, Love Daddy stopped it by shouting as only Samuel L Jackson could, ” Yo! Hold up! Time out! TIME OUT! Y’all take a chill! Ya need to cool that shit out! And that’s the double truth, Ruth!”

Pretty obvious, but that came in the middle of the movie so no one got the message.

Spike Lee’s final message was that once you’ve done everything that Love Daddy did and it still doesn’t work. It is then time to pick sides and just loudly say “Fuck Off!”

After which you can only turn up Raheem’s favorite song, his only song, “Fight the Power” as loud as possible and go to war.

Spike just hoped it would never get to that point, but even Godwin thinks we are almost completely at that point, which is why the “Doomsday Clock” is currently at two minutes to midnight, the closest to midnight it’s ever been.

When we hit midnight every single one of us is doomed so “Wake Up!”

If you get that you can stop reading, because the rest of this will just be me showing you how artists and prophets have been saying this over and over and over and over again, which is really the point of my website.

The rest may be fun and informative and show you good songs, movies, television shows, etc., but if you already know this only continue reading to see how many examples I can give and tell you finally how much I love the movie “Finding Forrester.”

* * *

The “Wake Up!” warning of “Do the Right Thing”  was completely ignored.

At the 62’d Academy Awards “Do the Right Thing” was basically only nominated for “Best Original Screenplay,” which it lost. The only acting nomination went to Danny Aiello, who through no fault of his own was white, and he lost. The “Best Picture Award” went to the one film sure to make Spike Lee most want to bang his head into a wall incessantly, “Driving Miss Daisy.”

The only bright spot that year for Spike was that Denzel Washington would win “Best Supporting Actor” for the film “Glory.” Sadly, Denzel Washington deservedly won playing a Civil War Soldier, who was completely filled with blind rage and looking to kill as many people on the other side before he too was killed in a battle, which was nothing, but a suicide mission. Spike’s eloquent very fair warning was not only missed it was openly defied.

But I’ve never cared for the Academy Awards or any award shows, they are merely games meant to promote movies and remember who played that game the best, Harvey Weinstein.

I originally wrote this for I believe “Film Threat” in 2003 arguing that even though the Academy Awards were complete and utter nonsense that if anyone should win a “Best Actor Award,” it should have been Johnny Depp, who through his own defiant artistic purity and insanity sabotaged a Disney Movie about one of its theme park rides, made all the Disney executives go completely crazy with fevered worry about losing tons of money over a guy who felt like playing a pirate like an effete Keith Richards, and wound up making a blockbuster classic. Fuck the Oscars: Vote Johnny Depp

Depp did get nominated for playing Captain Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl,” but lost. Bill Murray winning for “Lost in Translation” would have been awesome, but he lost. Sean Penn, who should have won an Oscar as Jeff Spicoli for 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High won for perhaps his most histrionic performance ever in “Mystic River.”

Sadly, Depp loved being Jack Sparrow so much that he would become him 24-7-365, and would go on to make at last count like 137 sequels to it. This pretty much ended Depp’s career as a real artist.  If you haven’t read “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Princess Bride” screenwriter, William Goldman’s classic 1983 book “Adventures in the Screen Trade” you should immediately. In it, he says that the only sure sign of artistic bankruptcy is doing sequels.

 

Spike Lee in 1989 warned us about the 1992 Rodney King riots and nobody paid attention. After that Spike decided to stop using Samuel L. Jackson in small parts and cast Denzel Washington as often as possible in big parts.

Meanwhile, 1989’s “Best Director” Oliver Stone went on to make a technically brilliant, three and a half hour long propaganda movie worthy of Leni Riefenstahl’s admiration  called “JFK,” in 1991. It was a completely silly, urgent movie calling upon the American citizens to demand the immediate release of as many files about the Kennedy Assassination as was humanly possible, and it worked! Files were released because of that film, but Stone’s conspiracy theory movie just made people dumber than they already were and really nothing new was learned about Nov. 22, 1963.

So the arms race was on, and Spike Lee pulled out all the guns.  He decided to make Malcolm X. He shamed sympathetic, white liberal Norman Jewison off the project, hired Denzel to play Malcolm, demanded as much money for his film as Stone had gotten for JFK, and made his own three and a half hour epic.

To make sure no one missed his point he decided to imitate Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and bookend a really good and fair movie, with a hyperbolic opening that featured footage of the Rodney King beating and the burning of the American Flag.

He already had the greatest most inspirational ending possible. Ossie Davis, from “Do the Right Thing” reenacting his legendarily  epic “real” eulogy of Malcolm:

Note the short clip of Malcolm in real life saying, “You haven’t done the right thing!”

But he could no longer afford to be subtle, so he went further and got Nelson Mandela to inspirationally recite Malcolm’s most famous war cry. There was one small snag, Mandela would not say the last three words. Malcolm was had been dead since 1965, so he had no say in it, and Spike used footage of the real Malcolm to end the movie with “By any means Necessary.”

Aside from the bookends, I still think it is a wonderful and even handed portrayal of the legend Malcolm created for himself.

I attended its Oakland premiere, again with my friend Rasheed. I was one of very few whites there. We did not have good seats. Rodney King was even there! I still think that it is a wonderful movie and that Spike was right to go “by any means necessary” on Norman Jewison and Hollywood to get it made.

In today’s climate be careful if you remind people that Spike had to ask not only Oprah, but indeed Bill Cosby to make donations to get the film made.

At the 65th Academy Awards, Malcolm X was not nominated for “Best Picture.” Spike was not nominated for “Best Director” and Denzel somehow lost to one of Al Pacino’s worst performances ever in “Scent of a Woman.” Pacino in “Scent of a Woman” was not even remotely as good as “Best Supporting Actor” nominee Al Pacino in “Glengarry Glen Ross!”

Denzel would have to wait until the 74th Academy Awards in 2002 to win his only “Best Actor” Oscar for “Training Day” and sadly only did so, because Russel Crowe went Russell Crowe and did not get to participate in the love fest for Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind.”

As for me, after Johnny Depp lost, I tried to re-appropriate  old material for attention before the following year’s Academy Awards, by posting my article on Chicago radio host Nick Digilio’s message board. Nick Digilio has the job I’d most like in the world, a pop culture radio show. For my efforts, one of his fans accused my of plagiarism, because I posted it under my “punk rock name” Keith Crime.

“Keith Crime you did not write this, it was written by Brad Laidman for Film Threat.”

Hilariously, this led to one of my prouder moments of all time, when Nick Digilio came to my defense on his own message board against my attacker by telling her that indeed “Keith Crime is Brad Laidman!”

Nick Digilio’s show was exactly what I needed in the middle of the night as a kid, whose brain would not shut off. I called in a lot looking for affirmation of my pop culture talents. Once I even made it onto the WGN page.

 

The best and most inspiring book I’ve ever read is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

That book is about learning and evolving, and you can actually see the man learning and evolving as you read the book, because while the book was being written Malcolm was still learning and evolving. It’s a really inspiring book, but a complete tragedy short term for the man whose story it aims to tell. It claims to be an autobiography, but it was actually ghost written by Alex Haley. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” is actually a suicide note from a man who had a dream.

People who do not understand complexity, history, or nuance will tell you that Martin Luther King was the man who had a dream, and that the one person in history that was the complete opposite of Martin Luther King was Malcolm X. They will tell you that you need to choose between Martin and Malcolm just like you have to choose between love and hate. But every man and woman has a dream and Malcolm’s was actually fulfilled. It was fulfilled due to one of Malcolm’s last acts. Alex Haley had a ton of family stories that had been passed down from generation to generation. Malcolm’s biggest legitimate gripe was that the people who shared his skin color had been robbed of their history and didn’t know where they came from or even their real last names.

Before he was assassinated, by his small family who supposedly cherished loyalty, He learned that small family had been corrupted by lust and greed. He decided that he needed a bigger and better family and Malcolm basically chose his new family by going back to Africa, the land where his real family had been stolen from along with his history and real last name.

* * *

Supremely talented people keep taking the work and messages of those who came before them and remaking the same movies, rewriting the same songs, and re-envisioning the same art over and over again. Because they are supremely talented and because those messages are so good, they get away with that and still produce great art.

Basically, if you believe your high school AP English teacher, you will believe that everything worth saying has already been said before by Shakespeare and that nobody can ever do so better than him. That teacher may even be 100% correct, but reading much less mastering Shakespeare takes a ton of work. Shakespeare’s work was done a really long time ago, and even though you read him in English class, it may as well be in a completely different language. For better or worse, most of us are lazy, and we get more excited by newer and shinier things.

There was no reason to remake “Brian’s Song”. The movie with James Caan and Billy Dee Williams was perfect to me, but they did. Most of the time, I am willing to watch talented people do this, unless they call it the exact same thing and tell the exact same story. So, while I did not watch the remake of Brian’s Song, I am willing to love “Finding Forrester” after seeing “Amadeus” even though they are basically the exact same movie with even the exact same actor playing the exact same part.

Similarly, I am willing to watch Gus Van Sant remake “Amadeus” as “Good Will Hunting” and “Finding Forrester.” I just am not willing to watch him make his own shot by shot homage to “Psycho.”

I often write variations of the exact same essay, hopefully with subtlety, over and over too. They are better artists than me, but my art is chronicling their art as artfully as I can. Either that or I am ponderous and repetitious. I always let whoever reads my work decide which, with a dream that someone will be somewhat impressed.